Links for 5-9-2016

Can Trump act any less constitutionally than has Obama? Will he scan existing law, and order his attorney general to enforce some statutes but ignore others? Will he boast that “I won” and thus has a pen and a phone to sign treaties with foreign countries without Senate ratification? Will Trump, in Obama fashion, threaten to cut off federal funds to cities that believe in biologically identified male/female restrooms, while encouraging other cities to defy federal immigration law? Sanctuary cities in California, but not in North Carolina? Are we back to 1860 and state nullification of federal law if and when the president wishes it?

Later:

As for the supposed fanatical Trumpsters, have they gone berserk with wild praise of Trump in near divine terms? Has a Laura Ingraham or Charles Hurt, or any other columnist, historian, talk show host, or journalist said that Trump’s neat pant crease presages that he will be a great president or that Trump makes his leg tingle, or confessed that Trump is a god, or assured that Trump would be the smartest president in the history of the office? So far, I have not read any such embarrassment in the Washington Times or American Conservative. After Obama, biased deification of a presidential candidate is old hat.

Harvard is itself just a big private club full of very entitled people, and it has a right to impose its own little rules. But the system adopted by a university, particularly an elite university whose graduates go on to positions of power and influence, is a model for what it thinks society at large should look like. That is, after all, the stated intent of the new rules, to reform the world of the future by stamping out all vestiges of sexism on campus.

But by seeking to enforce its rules on private clubs that are independent of and not officially associated with the university, by attempting to monitor and control the behavior of its students in their own, off-campus private lives and make sure they conform to the current political orthodoxy, the university is setting a very specific kind of example. The model it is creating is that of a single, central authority dictating acceptable attitudes and ideas, with no independent lower-level institutions that are allowed to depart from the centralized orthodoxy. Like I’ve said before, it’s that old principle of liberalism: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”